Gay rights activist Editor murdered in Bangladesh
DHAKA:Two people, including the editor of a magazine for the transgender community, have been hacked to death in the capital of Bangladesh.
A third person, a security guard at the apartment building where the killings took place, was seriously wounded in Monday’s attack in Dhaka, in which six attackers murdered Julhas Mannan and Tanay Mojumdar.
Mannan was the editor of Rupban, the only LGBT magazine in the country.”Unidentified attackers entered an apartment at Kalabagan and hacked two people to death,” Maruf Hossain Sarder, a Dhaka Metropolitan Police spokesman, told the AFP news agency.
Since February last year suspected militants have killed several secular or atheist writers and members of religious minority groups.The two men were murdered two days after a university teacher was hacked to death by suspected Islamist militants on Saturday. So-called Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility – but the Bangladeshi government insists there is no IS presence in the country.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Hasina vowed to hunt down and prosecute those responsible.She accused the country’s opposition party and what she called allied armed groups of being behind the killings. The opposition has denied the allegations.
No suspects have been arrested, police officer Shamim Ahmed told the Associated Press news agency.The incident came two days after a university professor was killed in similar fashion in an attack in Rajshahi, which was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group.
Mollah, a security guard, was wounded in the attack and is being treated in hospital [Mahmud Hossain Opu/Al Jazeera]Parvez Mollah, an 18-year-old security guard, told Al Jazeera that the six attackers were aged between 25 and 30 and that they had arrived at the building posing as couriers.
“They told me they had some parcels for Mannan and, as I went up to his apartment, three of the six attackers followed me to the second floor and attacked Mannan with machetes,” Mollah said.”As Mannan fell to the floor, the attackers entered the apartment and fired bullets before fleeing.”
Al Jazeera’s Tanvir Chowdhury, reporting from Dhaka, said that freedom of speech was threatened by such attacks.
“There is widespread fear in the country and the government is denying involvement of international terrorists or ISIL, even after such groups have announced that Bangladesh is one of their operating bases,” he said.
Earlier this month, Nazimuddin Samad, a 28-year-old law student, was hacked to death by three men riding a motorcycle as he walked with a friend in central Dhaka.Last year, at least four atheist bloggers and a secular publisher were hacked to death in a long-running series of killings of secular activists.
The South Asian country has seen a surge in violent attacks over the past few months in which liberal and secular activists, members of minority Muslim sects and other religious groups have been targeted.
